Why is Trump so popular? Visiting the south gave one writer some clues…

In his new book, Deep South, Paul Theroux explores the depressed pockets of America that, he says, have incubated an anger and despair fueling Trump’s rise

Why is Donald Trump popular? Travelling around America’s south for his most recent book Deep South, the writer Paul Theroux got some ideas. “It’s the gun show guys,” he says, sitting in his Hawaii home. “Virtually everything Donald Trump says, you can find on a gun show bumper sticker. Anti-Obama stuff, anti-Muslim stuff, anti-Mexican stuff, anti-immigrant stuff.”

The 74-year-old warms to his theme. “Gun shows are about hating and distrusting the government … people who have been oppressed by a bad economy, by outsourcing. They have a lot of legitimate grievances and a lot of imagined grievances. There is this paranoid notion that Washington is trying to take their guns away, take their manhood away, take this symbol of independence away. They feel defeated. They hate the Republican party, too. They feel very isolated.”

Theroux reflects on Trumpmania dominating the Republican primaries and caucuses. “It’s a whole undercurrent of feeling that runs all the way through the United States. The mood I saw in southern gun shows seems to resonate even with educated, white-collar, Massachusetts Republican voters. Because Trump won my state of Massachusetts, he won a fairly sizable majority.”

The writer witnessed the striking economic and cultural impact of outsourcing in southern towns such as Alabama’s Greensboro and Allendale. He sharply evokes Flowers Lane’s hovels and trailers, writing: “The heat made it all the smellier, as of roasted flatulence. It was the smell of poverty, a stink that no one, not even someone in the submerged 20th, could get used to.”

Theroux emphasises that 20% of southerners, black and white, below the poverty line need help. “Manufacturing has been outsourced. Their jobs have been taken away, so there’s nothing for them to do. They sit crowded together in their shack and watch a jumbly picture on a TV set. It’s very distressing.

“You don’t see that in many other countries. The level of poverty, and the level of despair, too. Of people thinking, ‘Nothing’s ever going to happen to me. I will never go to college, I will never get healthcare’.”

Theroux’s abiding memory of his journey was southern towns with their economic heart ripped out, factories shuttered, from Mississippi to hinterland Arkansas. Southerners complained to him about the unfair effects American trade deals such as Nafta have had, a complaint Trump is now tub-thumping. “Trump was making some kind of clothing line, but it was made in China. He’s a complete hypocrite in virtually everything that he says,” Theroux says scathingly. “I suppose that will come out. He’s hired undocumented workers, he’s manufactured things in China.”

Theroux agrees with Bernie Sanders that Trump is a “pathological liar”. He thinks a candidacy-curbing Trump scandal isn’t far off. “Trump is not unstoppable. I think that the Trump campaign will unravel because he’s such a devious man. He is untruthful. People who make that much money in business, and who talk like that, have hid a lot … I think something will emerge.”

Paul Theroux: ‘You don’t see that in many other countries. The level of poverty, and the level of despair, too.’

Though Theroux is feeling the Bern, he thinks Sanders’ campaign isn’t ultimately going to get enough traction. “If you say you’re a socialist, or a democratic socialist as Bernie does, people think you have photos of Stalin on your walls. He’s said a lot of the right things, but Americans aren’t ready for that amount of truth.”

He is sceptical about Hillary and Bill Clinton. “Bill Clinton is the quintessential southern huckster who doesn’t know when to stop,” he says. Visiting Bill’s old stomping ground of Hot Springs, Theroux is trenchant: “Still a disgrace 50 years after Clinton lived in town,” he writes. “Langston looked like a black ‘location’ in South Africa, ripe for uplift from an NGO, the very sort of place that should have been a target for improvement by the Clinton Global Initiative, but wasn’t.”

“Bill Clinton is a very complicated character,” Theroux adds, sounding conflicted. “I understood a lot of American politics better by being in the south. Him in particular by going to Hot Springs … What Dickens called ‘telescopic philanthropy’, where you look far, far away to look for poor people to help. Why is Clinton not in places like the Ozarks? And the Clinton Foundation has done some very questionable things.”

Theroux believes the Republican establishment only have themselves to blame for Trump’s rise. “Trump is the natural reductio ad absurdum of rightwing Republican thinking. Most Republicans echo what Trump says, but in a coded way, the dog whistle. Trump is merely saying out loud what most Republicans think … Sarah Palin was the Republican’s 2008 vice-presidential candidate. She’s worse than Trump. She’s done nothing, she’s stupider than Trump. Her views are all the same as his.”

In Deep South Theroux traces dog-whistle racism back to Ronald Reagan launching his 1980 campaign in the unnerving Mississippi place where civil rights activists James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner were murdered in 1964. “He did. I’m glad you noticed it. Reagan knew who he was talking to. He was talking about state’s rights, and so forth. He went there deliberately, Philadelphia, Mississippi. It was horrible; Reagan took advantage of this lynching and shooting of three civil rights workers. The memory of that has faded.”

He criticises fellow Massachusite Mitt Romney for being so enthusiastic about Trump’s 2012 endorsement after Trump’s “grotesquely racist” rise to national prominence as a “birther”. “Romney is totally opportunistic, not authentic at all.”

Theroux still believes Obama’s got true grit. “A wonderful president who has done marvellous things – with healthcare, getting Bin Laden, opening up Cuba, keeping Israel at arm’s length. Probably the best president of my lifetime. And I can remember Eisenhower, Truman … I wasn’t disappointed by Obama. I know what the limitations are on people who seek power.”

Theroux is disappointed that the deep south will vote for the Republicans in November. But he is cautiously optimistic about the south’s future, buoyed by the kindness, generosity, and warmth of people he encountered on his travels. The seasoned global explorer – who anticipated Tiananmen in the 1988 classic Riding the Iron Rooster – believes Russia, India, Brazil and China will implode. “I think China’s going to fail … when China fails, we’ll have to rebuild here in the south.”
~~

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Happiness is the only good. The time to be happy is now. The place to be happy is here. The way to be happy is to make others so. ~Robert Ingersoll

All religion is a foolish answer to a foolish question. ~Thomas Shelby

The strongly religious fear our capacity for moral reasoning that does not require a magical, invisible deity. They fear our ability to be ethical without the threat of hell or the reward of heaven. They fear that our allegiance is not to this or that country, or this or that prophet, or this or that guru, but to humanity as a whole. ~Phil Zuckerman

The idea that God could only forgive our sins by having his son tortured to death as a scapegoat is surely, from an objective point of view, a deeply unpleasant idea. If God wanted to forgive us our sins, why didn’t he just forgive them? Why did he have to have his son tortured? ~Richard Dawkins

Small is beautiful, when small is skilled and dedicated. ~Gene Logsdon

All religions are lies and scams, and all believers are victims. ~David Silverman

We [atheists] have no martyrs, we have no saints. ~Christopher Hitchens

Morality is doing right, no matter what you are told. Religion is doing what you are told, no matter what is right. ~H L Mencken

I've observed that people tend to live at one of two extremes in the spectrum of life: those who live on the edge, and those who avoid the edge. Those who live on the edge are hanging out in the most dangerous and unstable places — yet they're also often the most powerful agents of change, because the edge is where change is happening; away from the edge, things are naturally unchanging. ~Thom Hartmann

Religion. It's given people hope in a world torn apart by religion. ~Jon Stewart

My 12th year was my most Christian and most boring year in my life. ~Chuck Berry

Come on. You just can’t come up with anything more ridiculous than someone who honestly thinks that all human woes stem from an incident in which a talking snake accosted a naked woman in a primeval garden and talked her into eating a piece of fruit. ~Keith Parsons

When men stop believing in God, it isn't that they then believe in nothing: they believe in everything. ~Umberto Eco

Christians don’t need to be born again, they need to grow up. ~John Shelby Spong

Life is not a problem to be solved, nor a question to be answered. Life is a mystery to be experienced. ~Alan Watts

Society is like a stew: If you don't stir it up every now and then, the scum rises to the top.~Edward Abbey

You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete. ~Buckminster Fuller

How thoughtful of God to arrange matters so that, wherever you happen to be born, the local religion always turns out to be the true one. ~ Richard Dawkins

I’m not saying there isn’t a god, but there isn’t a god who cares about people. And who wants a god who doesn’t give a shit? ~Robert Munsch

One of the great tragedies of mankind is that morality has been hijacked by religion. ~Arthur C. Clarke

Give a man a fish, and you'll feed him for a day; Give him a religion, and he'll starve to death
while praying for a fish. ~ Anon

When you understand why you dismiss all the other gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours. ~ Stephen Roberts

Life is without meaning. You bring the meaning to it. The meaning of life is whatever you ascribe it to be. Being alive is the meaning. ~ Joseph Campbell

The only true definition of an atheist: a person who disbelieves or lacks belief in God or gods. ~Oxford English Dictionary

You have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.

Faith is just another word for gullibility.

I sang as one / Who on a tilting deck sings / To keep men's courage up, though the wave hangs / That shall cut off their sun. ~C. Day Lewis

Resilience Tools (Basic)

Freethought/Stoics

Religion Divides

The Wikipedia of Christian Terrorism (Link)

Books of the Freethinkers Bible

What is a fact beyond all doubt is that we share an ancestor with every other species of animal and plant on the planet. We know this because some genes are recognizably the same genes in all living creatures, including animals, plants and bacteria. And, above all, the genetic code itself — the dictionary by which all genes are translated — is the same across all living creatures that have ever been looked at. We are all cousins. Your family tree includes not just obvious cousins like chimpanzees and monkeys but also mice, buffaloes, iguanas, wallabies, snails, dandelions, golden eagles, mushrooms, whales, wombats and bacteria. All are our cousins. Every last one of them. Isn't that a far more wonderful thought than any myth? And the most wonderful thing of all is that we know for certain it is literally true...

The whole world is made of incredibly tiny things, much too small to be visible to the naked eye — and yet none of the myths or so-called holy books that some people, even now, think were given to us by an all-knowing god, mentions them at all! In fact, when you look at those myths and stories, you can see that they don't contain any of the knowledge that science has patiently worked out. They don't tell us how big or how old the universe is; they don't tell us how to treat cancer; they don't explain gravity or the internal combustion engine; they don't tell us about germs, or anesthetics. In fact, unsurprisingly, the stories in holy books don't contain any more information about the world than was known to the primitive peoples who first started telling them! If these 'holy books' really were written, or dictated, or inspired, by all-knowing gods, don't you think it's odd that those gods said nothing about any of these important and useful things? -Richard Dawkins

Prayer seems to me a cry of weakness, and an attempt to avoid, by trickery, the rules of the game as laid down. I do not choose to admit weakness. I accept the challenge of responsibility. Life, as it is, does not frighten me, since I have made my peace with the universe as I find it, and bow to its laws… It seems to me that organized creeds are collections of words around a wish. I feel no need for such.

I know that nothing is destructible; things merely change forms. When the consciousness we know as life ceases, I know that I shall still be part and parcel of the world. I was a part before the sun rolled into shape and burst forth in the glory of change. I was, when the earth was hurled out from its fiery rim. I shall return with the earth to Father Sun, and still exist in substance when the sun has lost its fire, and disintegrated into infinity to perhaps become a part of the whirling rubble of space. Why fear? The stuff of my being is matter, ever changing, ever moving, but never lost; so what need of denominations and creeds to deny myself the comfort of all my fellow men? -Zora Neale Hurston

Democratic Socialism

Socialist Alternative is the organization that spearheaded the campaign to elect Kshama Sawant to Seattle City Council, the first independent socialist elected in a major U.S. city in decades. We are a national organization fighting in our workplaces, communities, and campuses against the exploitation and injustices people face every day. We are community activists fighting against budget cuts in public services; we are activists campaigning for a $15/hour minimum wage and fighting, democratic unions; we are people of all colors speaking out against racism and attacks on immigrants, students organizing against tuition hikes and war, women and men fighting sexism and homophobia.

We believe the Republicans and Democrats are both parties of big business, and we are campaigning to build an independent, alternative party of workers and young people to fight for the interests of the millions, not the millionaires.

We see the global capitalist system as the root cause of the economic crisis, poverty, discrimination, war, and environmental destruction. As capitalism moves deeper into crisis, a new generation of workers and youth must join together to take the top 500 corporations into public ownership under democratic control to end the ruling elites’ global competition for profits and power.

We believe the dictatorships that existed in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe were perversions of what socialism is really about.

We are for democratic socialism where ordinary people will have control over our daily lives.

An atheist believes that a hospital should be built instead of a church. An atheist believes that deed must be done instead of prayer said. An atheist strives for involvement in life and not escape into death. He wants disease conquered, poverty vanished, war eliminated. ~Madalyn Murray O'Hair, Founder

In the history of the world, the number of times a supernatural anything has been proven true is zero. Every god, ghost, spirit, devil, possession, and miracle ever claimed true is a lie. No exceptions. The number of times an atheistic (godless) argument has been proven wrong by a theistic argument is zero... In contrast, every time a theist-versus-atheist argument has been settled, an atheistic argument has won. This does not mean science is antireligion; it just means (or rather, strongly implies) religion is wrong... I challenge anyone to find any scientifically valid testable proof of anything supernatural, ever. If you can prove it, even once, I'll quit my job. I'm not nervous, as it has never been done in history, because it's ALL a lie. ~David Silverman, President

Local Organic Family Farms

THE SMALL ORGANIC FARM greatly discomforts the corporate/ industrial mind because the small organic farm is one of the most relentlessly subversive forces on the planet. Over centuries both the communist and the capitalist systems have tried to destroy small farms because small farmers are a threat to the consolidation of absolute power.

Thomas Jefferson said he didn’t think we could have democracy unless at least 20% of the population was self-supporting on small farms so they were independent enough to be able to tell an oppressive government to stuff it.

It is very difficult to control people who can create products without purchasing inputs from the system, who can market their products directly thus avoiding the involvement of mercenary middlemen, who can butcher animals and preserve foods without reliance on industrial conglomerates, and who can’t be bullied because they can feed their own faces. ~Eliot Coleman